Here’s how I color line art. There are probably lots of ways, but this is how I do it.

First, I should say that I almost always work in RGB color mode and almost none of the lines I work with have been bitmapped (meaning each pixel isn’t either 100% black or 100% white).

For example, here’s a cover Tom Fowler drew for my Image series Lake of Fire.

 Tom works traditionally, with brush and ink on paper, so his lines have a lot of variation from black to grey.

You’d never be able to select just the line work by using the wand tool, but that’s no problem. Just go to your Channels palette*, hold down the Command button and click on the top RGB channel. That’ll load it as a selection and you’ll see all the marching ants parading around the line art.

* (If you’re doing this after you’ve already done some coloring, just turn off the visibility of all layers but the line art layer before opening your channels)

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kazucrash:

An interesting fact, Julie Bell used back then to literally look like a living version of her art :